Category: Historical Fiction

Gone With the Wind: Historical Fiction

Published on by Margaret10 Comments

Gone With the Wind

In a previous post on Gone With the Wind I wrote that I had learned a lot about the American Civil War and Reconstruction, about slavery (very different from Uncle Tom’s Cabin) and a lot about Georgia and Atlanta. In the comments Jane pointed out, quite correctly, that the book ‘shouldn’t be taken as history, but as reflective of a very strong point-of-view of American history, circa 1930.’

I hadn’t meant that I was taking GWTW as historical fact, but that it had led me to wanting to know more about the period and in that respect it had opened up new areas for me. For example, I’d never heard of ‘Reconstruction’ before in the sense of what happened to the southern states following the Civil War and I knew next to nothing about the causes of the war, other than the fact that the southern states wanted to leave the Union, that they wanted to be an independent nation. I was in no doubt, however, that the book is a novel – historical fiction, not historical fact.

All written history is a selection of facts and involves to a greater or lesser extent an interpretation of those facts. Its accuracy depends on the sources used, and in turn those sources inevitably are subject to perspective and bias. Similarly, historical fiction can throw light on the past; it can flesh out the facts, bringing the past to life – and it can be subject to the bias and opinions of the author.

I was fascinated to read that Margaret Mitchell, who was born in Atlanta in 1900 grew up listening to the war stories of Confederate veterans and yet she didn’t know until she was ten years old that the South had lost the war!

Margaret Mitchell was writing from a Southerner’s perspective, but that does not mean that her book is any the less invalid. She presents the Civil War period and its aftermath as seen through southern eyes and basically it is the story as seen through the women’s eyes. There is little about the actual battles, but this is still a war novel, even though it’s set mostly in the homes of the characters – in Tara, and in Atlanta. It depicts the hardships and suffering of the civilian population as well as the wounded soldiers, their grief and desolation and the devastating effect on the land and townships. You can see Atlanta going up in flames, the devastation of the countryside as the railroads and plantations were destroyed, and feel the hunger as the people starved.

Then there is the question of slavery and the Ku Klux Klan, both essential elements in the novel. The depiction of slaves divides them into two categories – house slaves and field hands, raising racial issues and the different attitudes between the North and the South towards the slaves. The plantation owners are portrayed as viewing their slaves, in particular the house slaves, as part of their family, protecting them and caring for them, treating them as children and of lower intelligence, and the slaves responded with loyalty to their owners. Again this is one perspective on the past, one that is at variance that of the northern states – clearly indicated in the novel. There are several references in Gone With the Wind to Uncle Tom’s Cabin in which Margaret Mitchell contradicts Harriet Beecher Stowe’s scene of bloodhounds chasing runaway slaves. Similarly the view she gives of the Ku Klux Clan is not what I expected. This led me to want to know more about the history of slavery in America and I turned to the one book I own, specifically on American history – Out of Our Past: The Forces that Shaped Modern America by Carl N Degler to find out more.

This is one of the things  I like about reading historical fiction – as well as giving me a glimpse into the past, showing me areas of history I know little or nothing about, bearing in mind that there is always more than one side to a story. And I really need to do more research into these matters.

Julius by Daphne du Maurier

Published on by Margaret3 Comments

Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca was one of the first adult books that I remember reading and it has remained a favourite ever since I first read it. It led me on to read more of her books and in my teens and twenties I read and re-read Jamaica Inn, Frenchman’s Creek, The Scapegoat, Mary Anne and The King’s General. They were the type of books that I loved.

Later on I discovered that she had written many more books and I’ve gradually been reading them, but, with perhaps the exception of My Cousin Rachel, they have not had the same magic quality that had kept me enthralled in the past. So I wasn’t quite sure what to expect when I began reading Julius, her third book written when she was twenty-six. It may lack that magic quality of her later books, but it is still compelling and disturbing reading, rich in detail and characterisation.

Julius (originally published in 1933 as The Progress of Julius) is the life story of a ruthless man, driven by his lust for power, and his dedication to getting ‘something for nothing’. It’s a chilling tale about a man whose love for his daughter brings about his ruin.

But that is jumping ahead in the story. It begins with his birth in Paris in 1860. Julius Levy grows up in a peasant family in a village on the banks of the Seine and caught up in the Franco-Prussian War, he escapes to Algeria, where he learns to swindle and manipulate. He moves on to London, all the time scheming and making money, getting richer, regardless of who he hurt, or indeed of whose death he caused as he built up his empire of cafés and married Rachel, the daughter of a diamond merchant.

It’s a dramatic story covering the years 1860 -1932, as the old century ended and the new one began:

Now came the close of the century and the death of the Queen followed by peace in South Africa, and these things also served as a milestone in the life of Julius Lévy. They marked the end of an era  showing him the path to greater prosperity than he had as yet achieved. It was the beginning of a new age – the age of progress and speed and efficiency that he had long foreseen and the dawn of mechanism in all things, electricity, motor-cars and soon flying-machines in the air. The spirit abroad was one he understood, the demon of restlessness unsatisfied stretching hungry fingers to the skies in a superhuman effort to conquer insatiable hunger, a spirit of rapacity and greed and excitement burning like a living flame. (page 195)

Julius is half-Jewish and the book veers on anti-Semitism, indeed in later years Daphne du Maurier considered excising those elements from the novel. But that would have meant the novel would have lacked depth as it is his Jewishness that lifts him from being a complete monster. As a mixed-up, lonely child he found in the temple that he was among his own people, and the music took hold of his heart, giving him peace. It is his tragedy that he lost that peace and struggled throughout the rest of his life trying to re-capture it.

His love for his daughter, Gabriel overwhelms him, but it is a possessive, suffocating love that leads him to extremes. His inability to love without the need to possess and control is shown early on in the book when forced to leave home and unable to take his cat he ties a stone around her neck and throws her in the Seine, rather than leave her to fend for herself or for someone else to take care of her. That made me shudder, but it is little compared to how he treated people.

I’ve read that Du Maurier based the character of Julius on that of her father, Gerald, that the possessiveness, the emotional demands and the sentiments Julius expresses were Gerald’s, and the words Gabriel speaks were her own thoughts. (Daphne du Maurier by Margaret Forster page 84)

At times melodramatic, this is a powerful novel, of a deprived, starving child who sold rats on the streets of Paris, and who dragged himself up from poverty and obscurity to become a man of  wealth and status and a cold-blooded sadist and murderer. I wrote about the beginning  of the book in an earlier post, describing how as a baby he was reaching for things beyond his grasp. The book ends as it began with Julius still reaching for the clouds:

He cried to them and they did not come. They passed away from him as though they had never been, indifferent and aloof, like wreaths of smoke they were carried away by the wind, born of nothing, dissolving into nothing, a momentary breath that vanished in the air. (page 308)

Gone With The Wind: Some Thoughts

Published on by Margaret16 Comments

Gone with the wind 001

Yesterday I finished reading Margaret Mitchell’s masterpiece, Gone With The Wind. I loved it. When I started it I decided that I wouldn’t take any notes as I read and neither would I mark any passages. I just wanted the pure reading experience, reading to get immersed in the story and Margaret Mitchell was a superb storyteller. There are parts full of description that enabled me to see the scenes and parts where I couldn’t turn the pages fast enough to discover what happened next, or how the characters would behave. It was a grand experience, and not just a reading experience but a learning experience too.

I saw the 1939 film many, many years ago and my memories of it are vague, not much beyond its setting, Clark Gable as Rhett Butler and Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O’Hara, and a few quotes: ‘Tomorrow is another day’ and Frankly, my dear I don’t give a damn’ – this is actually a misquote from the book – Rhett says ‘lightly but softly: ‘My dear, I don’t give a damn.’

 My knowledge of American history is quite limited, so I learnt a lot about the American Civil War and Reconstruction, about slavery (very different from Uncle Tom’s Cabin) and a lot about Georgia and Atlanta – I couldn’t even have placed them on a map before!!!

I liked the structure of the novel – straightforward chronological sequence told in the third person.

The characters are well-defined and are developed as the book progresses. Even the minor characters are distinct and I had no trouble identifying them. But the main characters are magnificent: Scarlett O’Hara, wilful, spirited, supremely self-centred and single-minded, a cheat and liar, but also charming, brave and fearless, as her character develops from a frivolous flirt to a much darker personality. She is obsessed by her infatuation for Ashley Wilkes, by her need for money and her desperate desire never to be hungry ever again. I swung between not liking her, admiring her courage, then thoroughly disliking the person she became and willing her to change – she didn’t of course.

Rhett Butler, black-hearted, flashy, a speculator, blockade runner and scallawag, who scandalises Atlanta, is the anti-hero who is gradually revealed as a hero, a tender-hearted, over-indulgent father, who really does love Scarlett, even though he can’t tell her. He’s a much more complicated character than Scarlett who understands human nature much better than Scarlett, seeing both the goodness and strength in Melanie Hamilton (Scarlett’s sister-in-law and Ashley’s wife).

There is so much to write about this book, (and I’m thinking of writing at least one more post about it) but for now I’m ending with these words from Margaret Mitchell when she was asked what Gone With The Wind was about:

… if the novel has a theme it is that of survival. What makes some people come through catastrophes and others, apparently just as able, strong and brave go under? It happens in every upheaval. Some people survive; others don’t. What qualities are in those who fight their way through triumphantly that are lacking in those that go under? I only know that survivors  used to call that quality ‘gumption’. So I wrote about people who had gumption and those who didn’t. (1936) (About the Author)

Books Read in October

Published on by Margaret2 Comments

October was a good reading month for me. I read 11 books, which were a mixed bag of different genres, but all fiction this month, with two books from my to-be-read shelves. I’ve already written about some of the books (the links are to my posts):

1.The Shining by Stephen King (Kindle)

2.Ten Little Niggers by Agatha Christie

3. Over My Dead Body by Hazel McHaffie

4. The Year of Miracle and Grief by Leonid Borodin

5. The Idea of Perfection by Kate Grenville (library book)

6. A Murder is Announced by Agatha Christie (a book from my to-be-read shelves)

When I started this blog I wanted to write something about each book I read. I’ve never managed to do that and now I’ve decided that there are some books I don’t want to write about at all and for some I just want to write a few words. That’s not because I didn’t enjoy the books but simply because sometimes I just want to read and then go on to another book.

These are the books without posts (with links to Amazon UK):

6.Once Upon a Castle by Alan S Blood (Kindle, LibraryThing Early Reviewers) – a story about children evacuated to Northumberland during World War II, this had so much potential and it just wasn’t achieved. It is basically a series of short stories and I thought there were too many episodes packed into it. It needs more detail and development to be convincing. It’s unevenly paced, as though the author didn’t know how to finish it and rushed the ending. The supernatural elements come across as confusing rather than mysterious or spooky.

5. The Shooting Party by Isabel Colegate – I liked this novel, which chronicles the events of one day at a shooting party on an Oxfordshire country estate. There is a great sense of foreboding right from the start with the statement: ‘It was an error of judgment which resulted in a death. It took place in the autumn before the outbreak of what used to be known as the Great War.’ Although I could see how this was foreshadowing the slaughter of the First World War, for me it was the knowledge that a death was going to take place, right from the opening paragraphs, that was uppermost. I kept wondering who was going to die, what was the error of judgment, who was going to do the killing. I was surprised.

I did think it was rather too slow, too drawn out in parts but that maybe because I’m used to much faster paced books. I also had to keep reminding myself of the characters – their relationships to each other and at times I got confused and had to back track.

But its main attraction for me was the focus on a society that was soon to be destroyed by the devastation wrought by the First World War. Isabel Colegate writes beautifully depicting the class structure of the times, the rich aristocrats and their servants, ‘the stranglehold of the rich on the life-blood of the working man‘, ideas about manliness, the realization that civilisation as they knew it was coming to an end, contrasting it to a vision of England that had not existed even then for many years:

Doesn’t England mean a village green, and smoke rising from cottage chimneys, and the rooks cawing in the elms, and the squire and the vicar and the schoolmaster and the jolly villagers and their rosy-cheeked children? (page 100)

7. The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald (a re-read). I really like this book – a portrait of the Jazz Age in all of its decadence and excess.

8. Dying Fall by Elly Griffiths (library book) – This is the fifth of her Ruth Galloway books. Ruth travels from her home in Norfolk up to the north of England €“ Lancashire, to be precise Blackpool, Lytham, Pendle, Preston and Fleetwood €“ because Dan Golding a friend from university has died in a house fire. He had written to her just before his death with news of an amazing find. It turns out that Dan was murdered and Ruth and Inspector Harry Nelson are instrumental in discovering the truth. It’s yet another book I’ve read about the whereabouts of King Arthur’s Bones €“ this time it seems he’s the Raven King. A satisfying if undemanding read.

11. Mrs Harris goes to Moscow by Paul Gallico (a book from my to-be-read shelves). This is a lovely little book. Mrs Harris is a London char lady who wins a trip to Moscow, where she wants to find her employer’s long-lost love. Mayhem ensues when she is thought to be Lady Char (the Russians not understanding what a ‘char lady’ is had converted it to ‘Lady Char’) and also a spy.

I sometimes borrow books and after reading the first few pages return them without reading any more, with no qualms. But it is very rare that I return a book unfinished after reading just over a quarter of it. That is just what I did with The Assassin’s Prayer by Ariana Franklin. I thought it was repeating much the same sort of scenarios (albeit in different locations) than her earlier books and I got fed up – so back it went.

First Chapter First Paragraph: Julius

Published on by Margaret14 Comments

First chapterEvery Tuesday Diane at Bibliophile by the Sea hosts First Chapter First Paragraph Tuesday Intros, where you can share the first paragraph or (a few) of a book you are reading or thinking about reading soon.

One of the books I’m currently reading is Julius by Daphne du Maurier. The first chapter is called Childhood (1860-1872). It begins:

 His first instinct was to stretch out his hands to the sky. The white clouds seemed so near to him, surely they were easy to hold and to caress, strange-moving, things belonging to the wide blue space of heaven.

They floated just above his head, they almost brushed his eyelids as they passed, and he only had to grasp the long curling fringe of them with his fingers and they would belong to him instead, becoming part of him for ever. Something in him whispered that he must clutch at the clouds and bring them down from the sky. So he held out his hands to them and they did not come. He cried out to them and they did not come. They passed away from him as though they had never been, indifferent and aloof; like wreaths of white smoke they were carried away by the wind, born of nothing, dissolving into nothing, a momentary breath that vanished in the air.

What do you think? Would you keep reading?

I did and I’m finding it quite captivating. The ‘he’ in these first two paragraphs is Julius and right from his birth you can see him reaching out for things beyond his grasp.

My Antonia by Willa Cather

Published on by Margaret7 Comments

I’d included My Antonia on my Classics Club list of books to read because I’d enjoyed reading A Lost Lady a few years ago (my post on that book is here). So when it popped up in the Classics Club Spin as the book to read in August/September I was pleased.

I liked it, but not as much as A Lost Lady. I think it’s because it’s a bit fragmented, made up of  a series of short stories. But it’s beautifully written with vivid descriptions of people and places. Published in 1918 it’s set in America at the beginning of the 20th century – the story of immigrant settlers and in particular that of Antonia Shimerda and her family as told by Jim Burden. Jim and Antonia meet as children, when he had come to live with his grandparents on their farm in Nebraska. Antonia’s family is from Bohemia, speaking very little English and living in a sort of shed, little more than a cave. They spend a lot of time together as Jim teaches Antonia to speak English.

Jim recounts various episodes as they grow up together. Gradually they drift apart and lose contact, as Jim left for college eventually becoming a lawyer, whilst Antonia stayed in Nebraska. They meet again years later. It’s a story of hardship and suffering, of poverty, people struggling to make a living from the land, and of the attitudes towards immigrants, women and children. It’s also about being an outsider and the importance of belonging, which makes it most poignant that to her father Antonia is ‘My Antonia’.

But the thing that stands out for me is the beauty of Cather’s descriptions of the countryside and as I read I highlighted many passages – this for example:

Presently we saw a curious thing: there were no clouds, the sun was going down in a limpid gold-washed sky. Just as the lower edge of the red disk rested on the high fields against the horizon, a great black figure suddenly appeared on the face of the sun. We sprang to our feet, straining our eyes toward it. In a moment we realized what it was. On some upland farm, a plough had been left standing in the field. The sun was sinking just behind it. Magnified across the distance by the horizontal light, it stood out against the sun, was exactly contained within the circle of the disk; the handles the tongue, the share black against the molten red. There it was, heroic in size, a picture writing on the sun.

Even while we whispered about it, our vision disappeared; the ball dropped and dropped until the red tip went beneath the earth. The fields below us were dark, the sky was growing pale, and that forgotten plough had sunk back to its own littleness somewhere on the prairie. (page 186)

But it’s not just descriptive, it conveys the timelessness of human nature, of how people interact and think, their prejudices, unreliability and of their love for each other. I was struck by this definition of happiness:

I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness: to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep. (page 11)

Yet this is a sad book, full of nostalgia and poignancy. There’s such a contrast between the hardness of the life of the settlers and the loving gentle family life that Jim’s grandparents provide for him and their generosity towards their neighbours. Overall, though it is the character of Antonia that caught my attention and in the episodes that weren’t about her I lost interest somewhat. So, a mixed reaction – there are parts that I thought were outstanding and parts that left me rather unsatisfied.